I am part of a modern generation of search engine marketers who look at usability, design, and ROI as measures of success in a holistic SEM strategy. Follow my bike ride to Florida >
My mom gets her own website!
August 11th, 2009 || 1 Comment »
I spent last night quickly putting together a Wordpress-based site for my mother. She is a concert violinist who has now decided that she would rather work for herself and do strictly free-lance work. Her website is meant to be a place to send potential clients and for people to find her through search. The site went up just last night and I have not had time to put much effort into including strong calls to action or elements to make it more SE-friendly. (I worked until around 3AM, then realized that I was going on a run at Central Park with Peter Shankman at 5:30. My eyes are hurting.)
However, I am confident that I can get her on page 1 for some pretty nice geo-targeted, violinist-related keywords. The most obvious one is “New York Violinist“. Apparently there is plenty of domain name real estate out there to grab in this niche, like this awesome domain name, newyorkviolinist.com.
Going to Affiliate Summit East 2009
August 8th, 2009 || No Comments »
I will be at Affiliate Summit East 2009 on behalf of Blue Fountain Media, starting Sunday and going through Tuesday. This is my first time there, although the names and topics are quite familiar.
Here are a few of the folks that I plan on seeing there:
- Michael Gray, Owner, Atlas Web Services (Twitter @graywolf)
- Rae Hoffman, Owner, Sugarrae Inc (Twitter @sugarrae)
- Michael Streko, Owner, Streko Media LLC (Twitter @streko)
- Chris Brogan, President, New Marketing Labs (Twitter @chrisbrogan)
- Brent Csutoras, Social Media Consultant, Brent Csutoras, Inc. (Twitter @brentcsutoras)
- Todd Malicoat, Owner, Meta4 Creations, LLC (Twitter @stuntdubl)
- Chris Winfield, President, 10e20 (Twitter @chriswinfield)
- Todd Friesen, Director, SEO, Position Tech (Twitter @oilman)
- Kate Morris, Co-Founding Demon, Marketing Demons (Twitter @katemorris)
- Carolyn Shelby, Owner, CShel (Twitter @cshel)
- David Snyder, Co-Founder, Search & Social, LLC
- Peter Shankman, Founder & CEO, The Geek Factory (Twitter @skydiver)
Kryptonite Locks: You need reputation management
June 18th, 2009 || 1 Comment »
Kryptonite, you had sold me already. The branding, the coolness of all the kids wearing your bike locks around their waists, and the practicality of your products had all convinced me that paying $100+ for a lock was so worth it. All of that came to a halt last weekend…
I am really into bikes. So when I go to pick out a lock, I am serious. After pimping out my 1980’s Peugeot aluminum frame with new parts, I decided it was time for a new lock. My first thought was Kryptonite. Read the rest »
I love Threadless
May 22nd, 2009 || No Comments »
Spam on Vanderbilt.edu domain
April 14th, 2009 || No Comments »
I just noticed this piece of spam on the Vanderbilt subdomain, boinc.vanderbilt.edu. (Why am I surprised to find a Viagra ad on a domain name called “boinc”? Boinc btw is the name of an “open-source software for volunteer computing and grid computing.”)
The way I found this page was through a spammy comment on my company blog. What I also found out was that I could create my very own page on the Vanderbilt.edu domain. This appears to be common practice for viagra spammers. Below you can see both the spam page, and my very own page that I was easily able to create.
Spam page
Spam on Vanderbilt.edu subdomain. Click image to see full size.
My own test page
The page that I created as a test on Vanderbilt.edu. Click the image to see full size.
Surprise Industries!
March 26th, 2009 || No Comments »
I attended the Media Networking Event at Columbia University last night on behalf of Blue Fountain Media and met Maya Gilbert from a very interesting start-up, called SurpriseIndustries. I promised I would blog about it because it is quite an interesting idea:
What is Surprise Industries?
They sell surprises.
What kind of surprises are we talking about?
The surprises can be anything from a ride on a ferris wheel, to an acrobatic yoga class, to a sessions of hypnotherapy. The company does a good job of matching up surprise-seekers with the appropriate surprise.
How they can benefit you & your friends:
You tell them what time slots you are available for a surprise, and at any point you will be surprised with an interesting experience. You only pay for the cost of the activity. These surprises can also be gifted.
How they can benefit your business:
This is a great way to connect with potential clients. Come up with a good “surprise” that would interest someone: if you’re an SEO, that could be for example, creation of social media profiles and a blog. If you’re a web designer, why not create a mockup for a personal or family website? In the end, the point is that anyone who is surprised by your services will most likely talk about you to their friends as well. And we all know how effective word-of-mouth referrals are.
Avoid dupe content FAIL
March 10th, 2009 || 1 Comment »
Launch a redesigned website without destroying your SEO
Imagine you are doing a redesign on a gigantic website and you may or may not be doing some SEO for later down the road. As a responsible web developer you probably want to ensure that the client does not start to question why, all of a sudden, their search engine traffic dropped off the side of a cliff.
If you can preserve URLs as they are, then fine, there’s probably is not too much to worry about. But when you create a whole new URL structure and you’ve got a lot of pages, Here are a few basic steps to ensure that the website launch goes well. It is probably not the BEST way, but it is the SAFE way.
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Take a note of all indexed pages.
To do so, simply check with Google, using the parameter, site:www.reallyridiculouslygoodlookingwebsite.com . Make sure to show all supplementary results as well so that you have a more complete list. If you are using the SEO plugin for Firefox (http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html) then you’ll be able to download this list as a .csv file. Nice.
You can also go through the website’s html or xml sitemap for a list of its URLs. Have fun doing that. Read the rest »
The lasting effects of SEO
February 23rd, 2009 || No Comments »
If there is still anyone out there who wonders why SEO is a good investment, here are two screenshots from R.A.G. New York’s analytics showing 1.) overall visitors and 2.) total conversions. Blue Fountain Media provided SEO services between April and September. Since then there has been no work done to promote the website.
It is clearly visible that the fruits of our labor truly paid off after our work was done. R.A.G. was able to take full advantage of the holiday season search frenzy and many of those same visitors came back to the website early this year. Personalized search results had a big role to play here.
The ROI of SEO: Line graph showing number of visitors to RagNewYork.com from April 2008 to February 21, 2009.
I am member of the week
February 10th, 2009 || No Comments »
Thanks to my active and helpful participation on Entrepreneur Connect, I was chosen as member of the week.
Alhan Keser featured on Entrepreneur Connect for one week.
Did you see me at Comicon?
February 9th, 2009 || 1 Comment »
If you went to Comic Con New York 2009, you may have noticed an unfamiliar costume among the attendees. Referred to as “blue guy”, “blue man”, “blue friend”, and “blue dude”, this character was none other than Blastor from Biowars. And I was wearing the costume.
Me dressed up in the custom-made Blastor costume, photo taken by Jurgen.
Here is another photo taken of Blastor, alongside Halo.
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